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May 3, 2019 – 14:54 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – Carnegie Mellon The psychology professor, Dr. Marcel Just, has spent decades developing a sophisticated system to try to read your mind. Now he's making a breakthrough in suicidal thinking, reports CBS.
"We found that some concepts had been changed in people who thought about suicide," Nikki Battiste told CBS News. "And our method has been able to detect these differences and badyze exactly what they consist of."
His method begins with sophisticated equipment: a functional MRI. With fMRI, you see an image of brain activity. It follows the neurons that shoot in the brain when a person is thinking about an object or a concept. In other words, every thought or idea of our brain has its own specific pattern. What Just has found is that these patterns are similar in many people – unless you have suicidal thoughts.
"That's what psychiatric diseases do, they change your thinking, and this method can, I think, identify these changes," he said.
When we compare two brain scans of people who think of the word "dead", we get different results in someone who thought about suicide and another who did not. In digitized images, red represents brain activation related to self-thought. Among those who have attempted suicide, there is even more dark red.
Thirty-four people participated in Dr. Just's latest study. Half of them never had suicidal thoughts, but the other 17 had had and more than half had already attempted suicide in the past. Participants were asked to think about 30 different concepts, such as "carelessness", "praise" and "death" while their brain activity was followed in fMRI. The results were second-by-second snapshots of brain models that were then badyzed by a complex computer server, storing hundreds of thoughts by hundreds of people, with the power to search for unique patterns.
"We can tell if someone feels anger, happiness or sadness.We can tell how many a person thinks," said Just. "We can say on which subject a person reads a paragraph."
Just's method was 90% accurate in determining who had previous thoughts and suicidal attempts. Dr. Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, thinks that his work could lead to more effective treatment.
"If we could understand the neurobiology that underlies the will to hurt ourselves, we would be able to devise better treatments to reduce that desire," Gordon said. "The treatments we have now do not work very well."
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